This is a guest post by Anand Srinivasan who blogs on interesting web statistics at TechCrunchies.com. His new venture KnewThis.com; a hub for interesting facts shall be launching later this month.

One of the critical aspects of owning a blog is managing your relationship with your readers. The importance of this aspect cannot be stressed any further because the most successful bloggers around the world are those who can afford to maintain that relationship going.

Why is maintaining relationships so important? This is a question asked primarily by those bloggers whose focus is on search engine traffic. I was one of them and remember telling myself why it was a waste of time maintaining relationship with my readers when I should rather be building links for SEO purposes.

That’s a terrible mistake to make. As in any business, in the online world too, contacts – big and small, matter. As a newbie blogger, blog promotion is a vicious cycle. Other websites wouldn’t write on what you would say unless you are reputed enough and you would not earn that repute till others start writing about you. It is here that your contacts come handy.

Through my course of blogging, I came in touch with bloggers from across the world; some warm enough to ‘befriend’ me (virtually of course) just after a few exchanges. These people turned out to be the marketing mavens I was looking for. They offered me suggestions, linked to so many things I had written till then – all that helped me gain a lot of fresh exposure to my blog.

Life can be harsh and only a handful of newbie bloggers make it out big in the long run. You cannot always expect to become a pro blogger yourself. But with a lot of contacts, it is a matter of only a handful of your contacts to make it big or even moderately popular. Their contact can virtually catapult your blog to popularity too.

And come to think of it, where did all of this begin –with just one comment thanking a reader who took time to comment on your blog!